Viewing profile — kastagg

The mixture of motivations includes a desire to contribute something to humanity, a desire to make a mark or achieve recognition, or a desire to gain experience that might enhance …

If a maintainer complains about slop bug reports, instead of assuming the worst of the maintainer, it'll often be more productive to put yourself in their shoes and consider the co…

The text and context of the complaint can be used to steelman it, adopting the principle of charity. From that perspective, the most likely problem is not that bugs are being repor…

Nobody is proposing ignoring what people will buy. What I said is that literally thinking "this banana is delicious" does not achieve anything toward the actual delivery of any ban…

Capitalism is what it is in reality, not just in our fondest hopes. The problem with the phrase is the assumption that any day now, something else will inevitably come along to rep…

You didn't have an unlimited sick policy. You had an undocumented limit. Documenting it lets people know where they stand and protects them in the event they need to take sick time…

There's no value in thinking all day about how bananas are delicious. Before you can eat the banana, it has to be produced and shipped. That process does not even involve thinking …

People customizing their own machines to suit their needs is in fact a good UX as long as they enjoy it

What seems sinister or manipulative to you about Skinner boxes? Do you feel the same aversion to training dogs using treats or praise?

In this metaphor, are the printing presses private property?

On one hand, there are people who say "flood the zone with shit" and regularly signal boost memes from Stormfront. On the other hand, there are people who think that the New York T…

Did you mean "it's not only about GPL"? I said "licenses like GPL"

What is the overall end goal of the entire game?

The Sims has only very weak goals and scoring and functions perfectly as a sandbox.

Doing some calculations at compile time is useful. What sucks is when the language for expressing this is difficult to think about and interacts poorly with normal code.

The people who designed the first submarines had relatively specific engineering problems and applications in mind. They could bypass any philosophical interrogation of the word "s…

Carmack joined Oculus before the Facebook acquisition, so it's misleading to say he attached his brand to Facebook's.

That's misleading. Oculus wasn't originally Facebook, and it wasn't Facebook when Carmack joined. Carmack was working on the Oculus hardware around the time Oculus was founded in 2…

1. What is your alternative? 2. What is your definition of the problem?

Is it slower?

Related question: are there any alternatives which respect licenses like GPL? If I simply copy-paste code from a GPL project myself, I'm normally expected to preserve the license. …

An investigation is not an attack. Are Senators above the law?

To illustrate how far this discussion is from PKD's frame of reference, PKD didn't need encryption when VALIS used a pink laser beam from space to trigger anamnesis so he remembere…

This piece shows little awareness of Philip K. Dick's work or the circumstances of his life. PKD wasn't on the typical agenda of a sci-fi author, so it won't really work to analyze…